The Political Appeal of the Aggressively Normal Dad

Arts|The Political Appeal of the Aggressively Normal Dad

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota presents as a regular dad from the Midwest. He hunts. He fishes. He ice fishes. He is a fan of football, whether high school, college or pro. He takes photographs of fun birds and posts them to social media. He is so normal that his normality has become exceptional.

As soon as Mr. Walz made a splash on MSNBC last month, where he branded Donald J. Trump and JD Vance as “weird,” a crowd of Walz fans — many of whom had just learned that he existed — raced to produce digital evidence of the governor’s own radical wholesomeness. Photographs of Mr. Walz hugging a piglet or casting a line rose alongside dadcore fan fiction about how he would teach America to drive a stick-shift without making it cry and kneel down to re-chain its lawn mower while raising its wages and securing it free school lunches.

Every new image of Mr. Walz became an ad for how popular and inevitable his vice-presidential candidacy could be. On the day Kamala Harris announced that she had picked him, Walz was styled online as a jolly imp with a camo hat on his head and a dad joke in his pocket, “an REI hire” and a “Swiss Army Knife candidate,” the guy so benignly folksy that he could reclaim progressive politics as a nostalgic masculine pastime, too. For years, Democrats have vied to defeat Mr. Trump by pitching themselves as the normal ones. But only through Mr. Walz’s joyful performance, and his online boosters’ enthusiasm, has acting normal become a revelation and a thrill.

There’s something about the speed with which Mr. Walz burst from the Minnesota wilds to become America’s next top dad that helped alchemize the typical into the sublime. In a regular election contest, voters may have learned of a vice-presidential candidate like Mr. Walz in an unfocused manner over many months, as he perhaps slogged through an ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign of his own, then loitered in our awareness as he vied for the runner-up slot. Mr. Walz’s cozy persona has instead unspooled through a breakneck internet montage, which gives him the energy of a sitcom dad, one who embodies the archetype so winningly that he walks onto the pilot set and immediately becomes a star.